It took the internet - one of the most useful thing ever invented in the wholehistory of mankind - 20 years to go from being functional to being used by asizable fraction of humanity.

I'm pretty sure the story is similar if not longer for other useful technologies:running water in the house, steam, electricity, the lightbulb, the printing press,the computer, etc ...

In terms of recent, large-scale successes, Facebook and Google are probablythe things that spread the fastest in the last ~20 years. And both each tookclose to 10 years to reach planet-wide adoption.

In other words: it simply boils down to the fact that most people have no clueof most of what's happening in the world around them, and only start payingattention to something new once a at least 5 people in their close social circlehas finally hit them squarely on the head with it.

You want to see bitcoin succeed ? Talk about it around you at every possibleopportunity, show it to your friends, demand payment in bitcoins for ever littletransaction you do. If you want to start a forest fire proper, you must light smallfires in as many possible corners of the forest as possible.

And yes: you're going to get weird looks from people who'll be thinking "whata dork". Bear with the pain. People said the same thing to early internet adopters.Who's a dork now ?

Hopefully 10 years from now I can proudly wear a t-shirt that says "Bitcoin: Who's a dork now, bitch!?".

I personally got 4 friends and 2 family members to buy some.One friend lost his wallet when he formatted his hard drive (of course I taught everyone how to back up ... didn't listen).

But I believe the others still have their BTC safely secured.

Ah, and there was another friend who wanted to buy BTC from me. I wanted to sell him some, but my wife strictly vetoed it."We're not selling until Bitcoin reaches $30-$40, I don't care if it's just a small amount".

Truth be told, in Israel it's fairly simple to buy Bitcoin, you just do a normal bank transfer to bitcoil.co.il and get BTC. Sadly, my friend never actually made the time to do this simple transfer (15 minutes of his time, I guess).

If I had accepted, he would have handed me a bill or two in exchange for my coins.

I personally got 4 friends and 2 family members to buy some.One friend lost his wallet when he formatted his hard drive (of course I taught everyone how to back up ... didn't listen).

But I believe the others still have their BTC safely secured.

Ah, and there was another friend who wanted to buy BTC from me. I wanted to sell him some, but my wife strictly vetoed it."We're not selling until Bitcoin reaches $30-$40, I don't care if it's just a small amount".

The way you do it is: you immediately sell the person the coins witha comfy margin atop the gox rate, go back home and buy back theexact BTC amount you sold.

Net effect: . You made a profit, leveraging your expert skills (i.e. you know how to procure BTC) . You injected value in the bitcoin ecosystem, thereby increasing the fiat value of your own BTC . The size of your stash is unchanged . You potentially sired a convert

As a matter of fact, this is exactly the way I operate with every single thing I purchasewith bitcoins: buy BTC on GOX, spend BTC on stuff, stash didn't move.

The whole shebang takes slightly longer, but goes a long way in advocating bitcoins.

Ordinarily I'd agree, but the truth is since buying Bitcoin really is trivial in Israel (Thanks to Meni), then I expect someone to take these 15 minutes and send in the money to bitcoil. Really, it's that easy, and teaches them how to acquire larger amounts of BTC in the future if they so choose.

Ah, and there was another friend who wanted to buy BTC from me. I wanted to sell him some, but my wife strictly vetoed it."We're not selling until Bitcoin reaches $30-$40, I don't care if it's just a small amount".

Seems your wife is even more a believer then - I have been granted permission to sell some at 15$

back on topic:

Quote from: ripper234

If (and that's a big if) Bitcoin one day becomes huge (say 1% of the world's economy), 1 Bitcoin will be worth somewhere in the neighborhood of $100,000 to $10,000,000.

I'm not really able to quantify the chance that the above scenario will happen, but I argue it's more than zero, and even more than 0.0001.

So, by my (biased) opinion, "every rational person" should spring $5 today and buy 1BTC, because the downside if he lost his entire investment is minimal.

While I can relate to your line of thought, I think one reason is that Bitcoin is relatively hard to understand for somebody unfamiliar with crypto, P2P, monetary systems, etc. Even if you explain the concept to them, they pretty much only have your word for it. You might just as well advocate some random startup or penny stock.

To do a rational risk assessment of an investment in Bitcoin requires quite a lot of research and that's an effort many people (however rational) are not willing to make.

According to Rick Falkvinge, it takes about 10 years for a new technology to really reach the masses. He stated that it was about the same time it needed for blogging, Internet video and Wikipedia. I remember vividly when people were laughing about the concept of Wikipedia... Times are changing - often not as fast as one could wish, but Bitcoin is definitely here to stay. I for one am looking forward to 2019